Mueller, Comey and Courage

https://www.nytimes.com/2019/11/18/opinion/impeachment-hearings-trump.html

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Regular readers of this newsletter may remember my criticisms of both Robert Mueller and James Comey. I think Mueller ducked the tough decisions he faced at the end of his investigation and issued an ineffectual report that failed to come to clear conclusions. And Comey — during the 2016 investigation of Hillary Clinton’s email use — put a higher priority on preserving his own reputation for being above partisan politics than on doing the right thing.

The impeachment hearings of the last week got me thinking about this recent history, because the witnesses, like Marie Yovanovitch, have shown a strength that Mueller and Comey did not. Those witnesses have been willing to subject themselves to unfair criticism for being partisan in order to defend the country’s ideals. We all owe them a debt of gratitude.

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My column today argues that there is a larger issue here: The radicalization of the Republican Party means that other people are going to face versions of this miserable dilemma. President Trump and many congressional Republicans now treat anything other than partisan hackery for their own side as partisan hackery for the other side. So people who pride themselves on their nonpartisanship — diplomats, law enforcement agents, journalists, national security officials, Federal Reserve officials and more — can’t necessarily both do the right thing and preserve their reputation for doing the right thing.

That’s a reminder of the courage that Yovanovitch, Alexander Vindman and, above all, the whistle-blower have shown.

For more …

The Times’s Nicholas Fandos has a preview of the schedule of public impeachment hearings for this week.

ABC News’s Matthew Dowd notes that Republican voters started to abandon Richard Nixon before Republican members of Congress did. “Though the G.O.P. leadership in Washington is still fully behind the president, we won’t know if Republican voters around the country moved at all in being open to impeaching Trump until we get further along in the process” of public hearings against Trump, Dowd writes.

Jon Hamm — of “Mad Men” fame — portrayed Bill Taylor, another impeachment witness, on Saturday Night Live this weekend. “Hamm playing Bill Taylor on SNL is a good example of how career bureaucrats are, somehow, cool now,” Lawfare’s Quinta Jurecic writes.

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